Your Thanksgiving turkey, like most meat in America, was probably produced at an industrial animal facility in rural America. These facilities hold thousands or tens of thousands of animals in a confined space and can produce as much waste as a mid-sized city. They are prodigious factories that generate dangerous air and water pollution, yet unlike other factories, they’ve been given a free pass from reporting their toxic emissions.

Community and environmental groups have been pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to address pollution from animal feedlots for decades, and recent court decisions seemed to indicate that the veil of secrecy surrounding these operations might finally be tugged back. However, instead of following the court’s latest ruling to ensure that industrial animal factories report toxic emissions, the EPA is proposing a sweeping exemption that would shield thousands of livestock facilities from reporting.

This move represents the third attempt by the EPA to block these reporting requirements. Under President George W. Bush, the EPA suspended them in 2005, claiming the issue was being studied, then pushed through an illegal exemption in 2008, which was rejected in court. And now, Scott Pruitt’s EPA is making a fresh attempt to make the exemption even broader. It’s a move that favors industry over the health of affected communities. The EPA itself has rejected this exemption, a proposal favored by industry, three times before.

While polluters are benefiting from the EPA’s dereliction of duty, people who live near these facilities continue to suffer. “During the summer we can’t keep our doors or windows open because of the stench,” writes Iowa farmer Rosemary Partridge, who lives near 30,000 hogs concentrated in factories near her farm. Partridge has worked with Earthjustice since 2015 to fight for more oversight of industrial animal agriculture. “Sometimes it gets so bad [my husband and I] get headaches and feel nauseous.”

Feedlots tend to be clustered in low-income communities, and in some parts of the country, especially the Southeast, in communities of color. Earthjustice and others brought a civil rights complaint in 2014, which EPA found to have merit, over the concentration of hog farms in North Carolina.

A recent stinging report from the EPA’s independent Office of the Inspector General recommended that the EPA stop shielding polluters. Yet the agency still took a third, wild swing at stopping pollution reporting requirements for industrial animal agriculture. It’s time for the EPA to put down the bat and take the field for healthy communities.

American College of Environmental Lawyers, The ACOEL, is a professionalassociation of lawyers distinguished by experience and high standards in the practice of environmental law, ethics, and the development of environmental law.